I use to like Tether, it was a way to move money into fiat currency without actually buying the fiat itself. However, today it seems to be yet another form of manipulation. Tether makes up roughly 1% of the cryptocurrency market, yet somehow it is responsible for over half of the bitcoin trading volume each day. Something does not seem right with that.

UK-based cryptocurrency trading startup, Crypto Facilities, has become the first crypto platform to launch regulated Ethereum futures contracts, making a new derivatives contract available from 4 pm UK time on the 11th of May. The new Ethereum futures contracts represent another step toward the maturation of the cryptocurrency market as complex financial products such as index funds and crypto ETFs loom on the horizon.

For instance, if two parties decide to make a bet on Donald Trump winning the election, historically, this could only be done by either word of honor or by some ad hoc legal contract. For a say, small $100 bet, it would be absolutely a non-starter to pursue legal action in the case that one of the parties decided to renege on the deal in the aftermath of the election. Normally, the reneged-upon party would simply be left in the dust without recourse.

Here’s what’s Lisk all about: Most developers today rely on centralized giants, such as Google Play and the AppStore to put up their newly developed apps. These giants take much of the profits and attention from these apps, and Lisk believes all this should be going to the developers themselves. This is where its Javascript-based tech comes in. Lisk is incredibly exciting because it aims to offer a decentralized apps platform, one that actually favors the developers, and therefore gives them the bigger piece of the cake. Lisk was previously Crypti, and after proving itself on a community level, it was forked by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows into Lisk, in 2016.
It is composed of several key disciplines that will help you keep your profits and maintain a strong portfolio by removing inherent human psychological weaknesses. I’m not claiming to have the golden goose of cryptocurrency investing, but these strategic elements will certainly help in making the most out of what some see as a catastrophic cryptocurrency bear run – and what others see as an opportunity.
It’s easy to be swept away in the fervor of a frenetic market, and the fear of missing out can be overwhelming especially when you see altcoins rising by wild amounts overnight, but my personal guiding philosophy is to always try to keep in mind fundamentals to the maximum extent possible, to never invest in anything I don’t actually understand or see long term value in, and to only invest in things I intend to hold very long term (for at least 5 years), especially in such a volatile market.
Generally speaking, diversification -- the ability for investors to buy stocks in different industries and sectors, or based on market cap, growth rate, or dividend yield -- has allowed investors the opportunity to maximize their long-term capital appreciation potential. If one sector is doing poorly, a diversified portfolio might be hedged with another industry or sector that's thriving. Plus, with the ability to load a diversified portfolio with dividend-paying stocks, complete with reinvestment, it's often easy to build wealth over time. All it really takes is patience, discipline, and the resolve to buy stocks at regular intervals over time, regardless of how "high" or "low" the market is trading.
No. 6: Large financial institutions are moving ahead with crypto products: Crypto assets have drawn the attention of institutional investors. Large institutions, such as Goldman Sacs, Fidelity and Blackrock, have started to develop cryptocurrency products and the underlying Blockchain technology. To wit, Goldman is close to launching a Bitcoin trading desk. Fidelity debuted a crypto fund a year ago and is actively building teams for crypto custody and other related services. Blackrock, the world’s largest investment management firm, recently announced plans to invest in the Bitcoin futures market. We expect to see more institutions enter this industry and offer a variety of crypto-based derivative products.
As Satoshi notes, bitcoin’s irreversible, trustless nature removes the need for any middlemen to mediate and broker the process of payments from one person to another. Middlemen (e.g. banks and credit card networks) inherently introduce overhead costs and inefficiency into the system, which make transactions — and micropayments in particular — more costly than would otherwise be the case.
MintChip – Unlike most cryptocurrencies, MintChip is actually the creation of a government institution, specifically the Royal Canadian Mint. MintChip is a smartcard that holds electronic value and can transfer it securely from one chip to another. Like Bitcoin, MintChip does not need personal identification; unlike Bitcoin, it is backed by a physical currency, the Canadian dollar.

Shockingly, this is actually how banks work in reality. In the United States, the reserve requirement, or the percentage of net deposits banks are actually required to keep in liquid financial instruments on hand, is generally 10% for most banks. This means that if a bank has net deposits of a billion dollars, it needs to only keep 100 million on hand at any given time.

A stop-loss is triggered once the price of an asset hits your determined lowest price. When it’s triggered, the stop-loss will automatically sell for the next available price. For example, you bought Lisk at $14 and its value is $32 now. You want to realize your profits, but you’re not quite sure if the mania has cooled down yet. You set your stop-loss at $30 and go to bed. When you wake up, Lisk is at $27, but your stop-loss sold it just a little below $30.
Ripple addresses all these shortcomings by providing cheaper, instant transactions. These transactions are initiated using a single currency, XRP. Ripple and XRP are two parts of the same project. However, given XRP’s integral role and future use cases as a currency used by the general public, the price of XRP has rocketed in the last few months reaching nearly $0.30 at the time of writing this article.
Dan Caplinger has been a contract writer for the Motley Fool since 2006. As the Fool's Director of Investment Planning, Dan oversees much of the personal-finance and investment-planning content published daily on Fool.com. With a background as an estate-planning attorney and independent financial consultant, Dan's articles are based on more than 20 years of experience from all angles of the financial world. Follow @DanCaplinger
The inspiration behind Distributed Global dates back to 2013 when my thesis shifted around how this space would impact the world and where value would ultimately be captured, in digital assets not traditional equity in private companies. This catalyzed a partnership with fellow enthusiast and investor, Tucker Waterman and together we launched one of the first digital-asset funds, Focus Investments, with a thesis on capturing value by investing in the greatest digital asset backed protocols. We believed then and continue to believe today that most industries will inevitably be disrupted by distributed ledger technologies and decentralized digital-asset backed protocols.

When a coin has just skyrocketed by 300%, take profits. HODLing everything after such a major run-up is greed, nothing more. I’ve made this mistake more than once, thinking that it’s completely rational that since a coin’s value has gone up by that much, it will probably continue that way. It won’t. There will always be a correction. When you see a major run-up, like the one in December, it’s wise to start taking profits. How the hell can you buy the dip if you have nothing left to buy it with?

It’s almost 10 years into the introduction of the first virtual currency, the Bitcoin and yet, neither the Govt in India nor the RBI have been able to provide a proper regulatory environment, for the crypto currencies to thrive in India. There are many reasons cited: National Security, Threat to convention currency and unregulated investment, causing severe loss to various investors, who are not well versed in these new avenues of investment.
Holding gold privately removes the need to trust either of these points of failure in the modern banking system, but comes with its own host of problems. Namely, while gold has proven to be an excellent store of value over time, it is incredibly poor for actual day to day use in the modern economy. To transact with gold is excessively cumbersome and inconvenient. No one would consider walking around with an ounce of gold on them, measuring and shaving off exact portions of gold to pay for a cup of coffee, groceries, or a bus ride. Worse, it’s even more difficult and time consuming to send gold to anyone who isn’t physically in the same exact location as you.
In addition, investing in Bitcoin Investment Trust allows investors to keep their holdings in both bitcoin and stocks together in one brokerage account. If you buy bitcoin directly, you typically have to use cryptocurrency exchanges that don't offer regular stock trading, forcing you to have two accounts and deal with the challenges involved in moving money between them.
Over the past six months, the cryptocurrency crash has brought out the skeptics. In fact, the ongoing “Crypto Winter” is a healthy cleansing of the ecosystem because the correction is effectively separating long-term value creators from short-term day traders. All in all, we believe that a “Crypto Spring” will arrive. And, institutional capital, a.k.a. the sticky, smart money, could possibly usher in this new season.